1. Technical Field
This disclosure relates to the extraction of information about the quality of products and services from online user-generated content.
2. Description of Related Art
The quality of a product or service (hereinafter just “product”) may be one of the important determinants of the performance and long-term success of a brand. Quality may drive customer preferences, market share, customer satisfaction, brand loyalty, price, perceived quality, and ultimately firm value.
All these variables may be affected through the construct of perceived quality. Managers and researchers may seek to obtain measures of perceived quality through surveys or interviews of customers. These may be based on limited samples that are administered periodically.
Customers are also increasingly sharing their opinions about products and services on various online platforms, such as product reviews, bulletin boards, and social network websites. These online expressions of customers in media of this type are referred to herein as user-generated content (UGC).
UGC (particularly in the form of product reviews) may be influential in determining demand, sales, and financial performance. As compared to surveys of customers, UGC may be spontaneous, passionate, widely available, low in cost, easily accessible, temporally disaggregate (days, hours, minutes), and live. This type of content is also growing rapidly and can be easier to administer and monitor as compared to surveys. Also, an analysis of UGC may be based on hundreds of thousands of customer contributions to online forums. As such, UGC may represent the “wisdom of the crowds.” Thus, UGC can be a very useful source of information about the perceived quality of products and services. Almost all of this UGC may be based on consumer experiences with the product and thus is referred to herein as “experienced quality” or just “quality.”
Extracting accurate and useful information about product or service quality from a large database of UGC, however, can be difficult and time consuming. It can be particularly challenging to do this on an automated basis using computer software.